Blues Where You From

by Max Haymes

An article on the Blues
Brothers film (Lancaster Guardian - 1st. Nov. 1996), inspired me to write a
short version of the origins of the Blues which made their film possible.
Although the music on the soundtrack has more to do withsoul, jump
‘n jive and rock ‘n roll than actual blues, it has turned a lot of people on
to the genuine article.

The Blues originated in the
Southern states of the U.S.A. as sung by working-class African Americans. The
term ‘blues’ was first applied to a style of music in the closing decades
of the 19th. Century, but older blues singers ‘rediscovered’ in the 1960s
claimed the blues has been going “for centuries an’ centuries”.

Certainly, before the American
Civil War (1861-1865) slaves were reported as singing ‘sorrowful songs’
which the plantation owners/overseers immediately banned. Theseslaves were abducted from their homelands in West Africa from the early
17th. Century onwards. Indeed, in the latter part of the 18th. Century,
Lancaster was the 4th. largest English seaport involved in the slave trade, with
vessels laden down with cotton leaving St. George’s Quay and down the River
Lune for the open sea. On exchanging cotton and other goods for slaves on the
African coast, they headed

African slaves
would rather take a chance with the sharks
than in the filthy hold of a slave ship -- 1851.

for the West Indies and the
American colonies. Suffering degradation, violence, sickness, and death, during
the “Middle Passage” across the Atlantic in the hellish slave ships: the
slaves main occupation on arrival on U.S. soil (as it became later), was to work
in the rice plantations. sugar canebrakes, and later on, predominantly, the
cotton fields.

On the larger plantations,
slaves were domestic servants (house slaves) or agricultural labourers (field
slaves). It was the latter group that created the Blues. Incorporating work
songs, spirituals, childrens’ game songs, English and Scottish ballads, ring
shouts, and field hollers. The latter were literally a drawn-out cry and sung by
one field hand to another, some distance away in the next field. As the great
Mississippi Bluesman, Johnny Shines, once said: “They sung in broken English
an’ you could stand on Marster’s feet an’ sing about ‘im - he wouldn’t
know what the heck. He called ‘em ‘field
hollers’,"(1).

But these were sung by people
at work. In the few hours of leisure at weekends, some slaves were encouraged to
play the banjo and fiddle for white dances at the ‘Big House’ . The
antecedents of the ban­jo came from Africa and called various names including
‘hansa’ and ‘banja’. While the fiddle, or violin, was a European
instrument.